Carson Hurwitz
Game Designer

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My roles: Game Designer / Producer

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My responsibilities include:

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• Designing clue systems and thematically immersive features such as:

  • Shadow Vision - a cursor-proximity-based clue-searching mechanic that highlights hidden items with spiritual connections. I designed it this way because my goal was to create a clue system that feels unique for a mystery game while still being understandable for players, and that is challenging but also supports the narrative. The challenge of working with this mechanic gave me more experience in a holistic design process

  • Shadow Dialogue - an interrogative ability that allows you to perceive the true forms of characters' shadows which possess their darkest secrets. This feature's design required much iteration because I had to make it easy enough to use while also balancing its involvement in the energy system as well as progressing the narrative. I ended up turning this ability into a unique dialogue option in conversations, lowering the energy cost of its usage, and making its function be to hint at lies told by the characters

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• Managing and updating the game design document

• Holding the game's vision and effectively communicating it to my teammates:

  • I helped the team transition to total online communication as we are now working remotely in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. For a year now, I've been holding our meetings via Zoom and ensuring the team messages each other more frequently on Slack

• Making design adjustments based off playtester feedback:

  • For example, after hearing from our playtesters that the game's dialogue format was too confusing, I improved the structure by designing a conversation "home screen" that divides the player's responses into 3 organized categories of conversation topics (clues, personal life, & the victim), each of which holds the player's related dialogue options. We have received better feedback on the format since

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• Overseeing and working together with a 10-person team

  • Conducting frequent team meetings

  • Facilitating and ensuring communication between different team divisions (e.g. narrative team & programming team, or art team & audio team)

  • Assigning tasks to teammates of various disciplines

  • Monitoring project development and analyzing weekly Sprint Reports

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Accomplishments:

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• Demoed at GDEX's 2020 Exhibitor Showcase

• Successfully pitched game at the IU Media School's Shark Tank game design pitch competition (2019) to a panel of game industry veterans (Paul Stephanouk, Dave Rohrl, and Ray Holmes) and IU's Game Design department faculty, receiving approval to continue our project into development